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Times do not change

For the fainthearted . . .

“Interdiction formelle de garer velos, cyclomoteurs et d’uriner sous le porche” declared the sign at an archway in the French village. One does not need to be a French scholar to know it is about a formal prohibition of the parking of bicycles and mopeds and of urinating in the archway. The sign seemed of some antiquity and it seemed strange to imagine there had been such anti-social activity in bygone times, until recalling a similar sign in Kilkenny which declares:

Any person found committing a nuisance in this laneway will be prosecuted: By order of the Sanitary Authority

The plaque which is set into a wall of a Kilkenny alleyway suggests the city dwellers of Victorian times might not have been paragons of virtuous living; anti-social behaviour was obviously common enough to necessitate a warning notice that is clear enough in its meaning; committing a nuisance was not about playing pop songs badly with an open guitar case for catching the coins of passers by; it was about people behaving like their French counterparts and urinating in the street.

Listen to the media and you would imagine such behaviour only arrived with football fans and stag parties; that the present time was one of moral degeneration unparalleled in previous ages. Extra-marital affairs, casual relationships, children not knowing who their father is, those stories at once condemned and embraced by the tabloids press and the chat shows, are presented as products of the so-called “permissive society” of the 1960s, yet deep within rural communities they were commonplace two centuries ago.

The Revd John Skinner of Camerton, Somerset. wrote in his journal in 1807,

I had had occasion to notice the behaviour of a woman of the name of Sarah Summers, who kept company with Coward, a servant of Burfitt’s.

In the beginning of November, 1806, she came to me saying she wished to have the Banns asked between Coward and herself. I told her that it had been mentioned to me that her husband was alive, and therefore it would be very wrong in her to think of being asked without she was certain he was dead. She said it was all false what folks said about his being alive; that he went to the East Indies as a soldier upwards of seven years ago, and had never been, heard of since.

I accordingly asked the Banns in Church. Just as the parties were preparing to be married the husband made his appearance at Camerton, and on enquiring for his wife found out her residence and surprised her by his coming so unexpectedly upon her; whilst he on his part was no less astonished at finding four children, instead of the one he had left when he went abroad. However, as reproofs and complaints were useless, like a second Socrates he forgave the frail one and took her again to his bosom, and for near a month they lived together, I understand, in perfect conjugal felicity; but, unfortunately, the husband returning from his work in the coal pits sooner than was expected, found his rival with his wife. He beat her as long as he could without absolutely killing her, and immediately left the strumpet, going to take up his abode at Timsbury. The man afterwards married a Timsbury woman by licence.

Skinner tried to cope with a society not so different from our own. Notions of a bygone “golden age”, either at home or abroad, demand a very selective reading of history and turning a blind eye to all the inconvenient facts.

Read the opening of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge for a colourful and lively vision of the position of women of the period (and the position of men!) What about Dicken’s… Oliver Twist is hardly the stuff of all singing and all dancing family entertainment.

I suppose Skinner was most concerned with Sarah Somers because she was his parishioner. As a prostitute at Redhill, later bringing up her daughters as prostitutes, this nowadays would provide a mammoth subject for the study of female degradation due to abandonment by her husband, failure of further relationships, failure of being able to make a decent second marriage due to the unavailability of divorce etc. However, she made a successful family business out of being the prostitute in this village, offering herself and her daughters to the colliers for money , which is not something that every poor woman did. Skinner was most concerned with her eternal salvation, because he was her vicar. When she thought she was dying, she was most afraid, but did not give a toss about good behaviour during her life. Skinner had plenty to say against domestic violence in other parts of his diaries and went to desperate lengths to try and save Joseph Goold’s wife. Taking this excerpt out makes it look as if Skinner condones male violence, which is quite unfair to him. It probably isn’t surprising that Somer’s husband beat her. It is surprising that Mr Somers did not beat Coward, by which we can take it that Coward was bigger than Mr Somers and note that Coward was true to his name and did not stay around to protect Sarah. Not a good lot all round.Skinner was desperate to get the people of his parish to change the way they lived, without success. That was the theme running through his life at Camerton. He constantly gave money and provisions to the needy poor and wrote to the parish overseers constantly about every case where he thought a poor person was not being given what they needed. He was constantly up in arms about these issues.There does not appear to be any difference between then and now, regarding peoples general behaviour, as you rightly say. All the rubbish we hear about how much more people drink now compared to the past is farcical -when you read in his journals about how much people drank two hundred years ago and the social problems surrounding it! Reading his journal was quite an eye opener and very sad.I really felt for him.

Thanks for the lengthy response. I did not mean to come over as uncharitable towards Skinner; he is a man who goes through great pain.

I have only the Oxford edition of his journal (which I bought about twenty years ago), but his faith seems very much that of 18th Century Anglicanism – formal and serious and cerebral. He seems a man out of place in trying to cope with Camerton, his antiquarian interests being in a different world from that inhabited by Sarah Somers